


Ghost in the Water

by bittergreens



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, BAMF!John Watson, Canonical Character Death, First Kiss, Ghost!Sherlock, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD, Post Reichenbach, Post-The Reichenbach Fall, Reichenbach Angst, Reichenbach Feels, Romance, Sherlock Holmes Returns after Reichenbach, Slash, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:29:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittergreens/pseuds/bittergreens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first stage of grief is denial. After Sherlock’s death, John Watson refuses to move on. Sherlock has to intervene, even if it means coming back as a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost in the Water

**Author's Note:**

> I made a pretty sweet mix for this story while I was writing it. Here's a link for your listening pleasure:  http://www.8tracks.com/bittergreens/ghost-in-the-water
> 
> This story is for Anna and for Sev, who both helped beta this story. Thank you again for all your insights. You are my fandom soul mates. <3
> 
> JOHN: I’ve seen men die before. Good men, friends of mine. Thought I’d never sleep again. I’ll sleep fine tonight.  
> -Sherlock, Pilot Episode
> 
> Je veux dormir! Je veux dormir plutôt que vivre!  
> –Charles Baudelaire, “Le Léthé”

Blood. There is blood on the pavement spreading too fast; blood in Sherlock’s hair, on his coat, his scarf, blood still flowing from his temples; blood on John’s knees as he reaches out to take Sherlock’s wrist, fighting against the arms of strangers to find a sign of life; and then the shock of disbelief at the stillness there—no pulse—and the silence in John’s mind is like a roar of sound.

He never gets there in time. No matter how hard he runs, how violently he throws himself into the street, he’s always stopped by the force of the cyclist, thrown to his knees, momentarily distracted from the unthinkable, from the fate he refuses to accept. But as he crawls forward, staggering, desperate, it’s not the blood that stops him, or the contorted angle of the arms and legs, the wrongness of the body, it’s the blank blue of Sherlock’s eyes when they turn him over, staring up at nothing—unseeing.

When he wakes, shaking, shirt drenched in sweat, sheets twisted in a vice around his torso, he knows it isn’t real. Just a nightmare; and for a moment he experiences a surge of relief. It couldn’t be real because he wouldn’t still be here if it were true, because there is no world for John without Sherlock.

And then he remembers. 

The realization is like a physical blow—he’s falling, clutching at whatever’s in front of him, screaming with rage, blind. It’s minutes before he can get control of himself, before he comes back to find himself convulsed over on the bed, or on his hands and knees on the floor, the night stand turned over beside him. 

He forces himself to lie quietly, to count backward from one hundred to empty his mind, steady his breathing like he learned to do after the nightmares from Afghanistan. 

The pain is always the same, the discovery upon waking as brutal each time as it was the first. He will never get used to it, but he clings to the pain because it’s all he has left. Because without the pain it would be like Sherlock never existed, his life would be the way it was before, and John can never go back.

They forced him to return to his therapist in the months directly after. In the beginning he didn’t protest. He couldn’t bring himself to care one way or another how he spent his time; he was barely conscious of what happened to him, moving like a ghost through his old life. 

He has almost no memory of those first few months, except for when they tried to move him out of 221B. If it weren’t for Lestrade grabbing his arm just in time he would have broken Mycroft’s nose. He cuffed him pretty hard all the same; he’d never seen such a look of shock on Mycroft’s face than when he looked up at John from where he’d been knocked to the floor.

John remembers standing over him, breathing hard, one fist still clenched at his side. “Try and make me leave. Go ahead and try.”

He hears the whispers that float around him— _Refusing to move on, drowning in grief, stuck in the past, unhealthy_ —and they are meaningless to him. It doesn’t take long for him to refuse to continue going to therapy. It’s the same there. She tells him it’s time to move on. Make a new life for himself. She doesn’t understand. None of them do. He can’t go back to life without Sherlock, because there is no life before Sherlock. He has this pain or he has nothing. 

So he stays in the flat, haunted by memories, sitting sometimes for hours at a time staring at Sherlock’s chair, his chemistry set, his violin, the bullet holes in the wall, until he comes back to himself and it is dark outside, the empty hallway gaping like an open wound, the corners of the room lost in shadow.

Sometimes he goes on long walks, but they are just as bad as sitting in the flat, every street corner, every cab moving past holds a memory of Sherlock, and the pain in John’s chest is a physical ache.

Sometimes Mrs. Hudson has him downstairs for tea and he sits opposite her, not speaking, the tea growing cold in front of him. She talks into the void, talks about the weather, what’s on the telly, never mentioning _him_ for which John is grateful, except occasionally reaching out to take his hand, and John lets her take it, squeezing back without being able to match her smile. It’s better than nothing, but she too is a memory of Sherlock, and it gnaws at the heart of him to look into her brown eyes and remember.

Sometimes Lestrade stops by and fills him in on news from the station. He listens, but just like with Mrs. Hudson, he has nothing to say in return so the visits are never long.

Once, the first time he came, Lestrade brought up Sherlock, his tone surprisingly gentle. “He wouldn’t want this for you, John. He’d want you to meet people, make new friends, move on with your life.”

Suddenly John was on his feet without knowing how he’d gotten there, his whole body vibrating with rage.

“Easy, John! Easy. Forget I said anything. Just take it easy, all right? We worry about you.”

He never mentions Sherlock again.

Sometimes, sitting in the darkness after waking from the nightmare, with the long tunnel of silence and emptiness stretching out before him, John wonders if he will go mad with grief. He’s survived so much in his life—seen so much death, experienced traumatic experience after traumatic experience but none of it has ever affected him like this.

No one has ever touched his life like Sherlock did.

There is so much he never said. John never had a chance to express how much he meant to him, never said—

The wall comes down in John’s mind. 

It’s pointless to think about. Pointless to remember how he felt about Sherlock at the end, how he’d only just become aware of the space Sherlock occupied in his life, how he had somehow become more than a friend, more than a flat mate, a co-worker, a companion. He felt more for Sherlock than any of the women he had ever dated. And John doesn’t know what that means. He had been content to just accept it, not to question it, to simply trust that things could go on the way they were, because he was happier than he’d ever been in his life, and he’d never imagined, never considered that Sherlock would leave him.

He should have known when Moriarty came back, should have taken precautions, should have told Sherlock, made sure he knew that no matter what happened John would wait.

And wait is what he plans to do. Because deep inside himself he knows that it can’t be true, Sherlock can’t be gone. Somehow, somehow Sherlock must have found a way out of it, because if anyone can come back from the dead it’s Sherlock Holmes and when he does John will be ready for him. If he leaves, how will Sherlock find him? John isn’t taking any chances.

So he stays at Baker Street, and he waits.

***

At night he sleeps in the morgue, where he runs no risk of being seen. Sleep eludes him. He lies awake, haunted alternately by the expression on Moriarty’s face before he shot himself and John’s voice on the phone, breaking.

Molly brings him food. Cold bread, tinned beans. He shovels it down without tasting it. Necessary to keep the machine running. Sometimes she brings him tea, for which he is grateful, but he can never drink it. Even in its styrofoam cup it reminds him of John and he can’t bear the taste of his memories.

Sometimes he’ll go out at night, heavily disguised, but mostly he keeps to his storage closet at St. Bart’s, where he’s set up a mini laboratory, working out a solution to the impossible web in which Moriarty’s entangled him. He’s found two of the three gunmen, with help from Mycroft. But the last one is proving evasive. He seems to have vanished. Sherlock has no leads. The frustration of being so close to the end of his search and yet unable to move forward is maddening.

It’s in the midst of this period that he decides to see John. 

He knows he’s still at 221B; he’s heard from Mycroft that he isn’t doing well. “Poor chap can’t seem to move on.” Sherlock had sneered at him, something malicious, something that hurt, and Mycroft had left Sherlock’s closet without another word.

He hates having to rely on Mycroft, but he has little choice in the matter these days. Thank God for Molly. She is his only consolation.

He tells Molly he’s going, tells her with a challenging set to his chin as if inviting her to try and stop him.

“Right.” Molly’s dark eyes flash up at him and for a moment he sees pity before she pushes the emotion away. “Good luck then.”

“It’s just this once.” He says, as if she’s asked him. “Somebody has to look out for him.”

***

Sherlock still has his key. Not being seen is a simple matter of choosing the right moment. He checks that the lights in John’s window are out. It’s easy enough to slip in through the front door in the middle of the night and pad up the central staircase as silent as a ghost. He knows this flat better than any place; avoiding the creaking step and the spot on the landing where the floorboard groans comes to him as easily as breathing.

The first time he sees John asleep, his face pale in the moonlight, one arm thrown over his head, fist clenched—it’s like a shot of adrenaline directly to his heart. He has to lean his head back against the wall, take several deep breaths; remind himself how important it is to stay quiet.

He studies John from his place beside the curtains (he knows exactly where he must stand in this room to avoid being seen), watches his chest rise and fall with the rhythm of his breathing, watches his eyes flicking back and forth under his eyelids, counting the ticks, observing precisely when he shifts into R.E.M. sleep. 

John is like morphine. The steady drip of his presence into Sherlock’s veins makes time immaterial; from where he stands in the corner the night seems to pass in a heartbeat and before he realizes it, there is light leaking in through the gap in the curtains. 

Sherlock leaves, shaking, unsatisfied, just as dawn pours its grey light over the London streets.

***

After the first time, he can’t stop himself going back. It’s like an addiction. Sneaking into 221B at night, crouching in the shadows at the end of John’s bed, listening to the unsteady ricochet of his breathing is the only thing that keeps Sherlock going through the day. 

The nightmares are hard to take. 

Sometimes John makes no sound at all, but Sherlock can tell from the way his breathing becomes labored, from the way his body tenses on the bed that he’s in the throes of one. 

Other times, he cries out, yells Sherlock’s name. Those are the worst moments. To keep himself from going to John’s side, from waking him up and assuring him, “I’m alive. I’m alive! Look, I’m here.”

The longing in John’s cries, the terror—it’s like a knife through Sherlock every time but he grits his teeth and doesn’t move. It feels like penance for what he’s done. If John has to suffer watching Sherlock jump again and again without being able to intervene, it’s only fitting that Sherlock must watch John in pain, night after night, unable to do the same.

In the shadows, Sherlock grits his teeth. “Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso.” *

*Dante’s _Inferno_ , Canto 28, line 142

***

The first time he notices it is in a dream. 

It’s the same nightmare—Sherlock, his body dropping, John plunging forward, Sherlock’s name tearing from his throat, the bike clipping his shoulder, falling to his knees, the world gone sideways around him, but this time when he gets to Sherlock’s side, when he puts his fingers to Sherlock’s wrist, a pulse beats sure and steady under John’s fingertips and Sherlock blinks up at him, saying his name, alive.

He wakes with a start and then wonders why he woke. He sits up in bed and stares into the empty corners of his room.

He feels something—something in the room has shifted—imperceptibly, like the feel of a draft when someone has opened a window in another room.

He doesn’t dare turn on the light. He is certain that will chase the feeling away, so John remains motionless, pulse pounding in his temples, and waits.

Nothing happens but the feeling doesn’t change.

John lies back down and stares up into the darkness, wondering.

***

He waits almost a week before going back again.

The longing to reach out and touch John in the darkness has intensified. Sherlock has to struggle with himself to keep to his corner, hands still at his sides. He makes a promise to himself that he can only go back if he keeps his distance. However, as soon as he takes up his position by the curtains he knows that he will break his word.

John’s nightmare this time is worse than ever. Tonight, he isn’t shouting and screaming with rage (Sherlock has observed the broken lamp, the tangled bed sheets, and has taken it all in his stride—never intervened); tonight, he’s begging in his sleep.

“Please, oh god, please don’t.”

And it’s like John is hammering on the ice encasing his heart, hammering with barbed fists. Sherlock can feel the cracks, deep fissures that threaten to break all the careful protections he’s put in place.

John thrashes on the bed, makes a sound like a sob.

“God, Sherlock! _Please._ ”

And that’s it. His self-control is out the window. He’s on his knees by the side of the bed, reaching out to smooth the hair back from John’s damp forehead, whispering meaningless soothing things. He’s never been like this with anyone. Bizarre that he has these instincts like any other human—in this moment he would do anything to bring John comfort.

He takes John’s hands in his, holds onto them like a lifeline, thumb stroking the inside of John’s wrist, willing the erratic pulse to slow.

And then, he can’t help himself. He says his name, pouring all of his reassurance into that one syllable. 

“John.”

As soon as the word is out of his mouth, he knows he’s made a mistake. He feels John stiffen under his hands and in that instant knows that John will wake up.

On soundless feet he rises from the bed, retreats to his corner with his heart hammering in his mouth.

Sure enough, he sees John’s eyes open. The expression of fear—of longing almost brings Sherlock to his knees. _What has he done?_

He doesn’t sit up. He watches John shut his eyes and thinks maybe it will be all right, but then, he hears his name.

“Sherlock?”

So tentative—the hope in that one word as fragile as the membrane of a newly hatched egg.

In the ensuing silence, Sherlock can hear the sound of John’s heart breaking.

***

The next time it happens is almost identical to the first.

This time, when John takes Sherlock’s wrist in his hands, Sherlock’s fingers grasp him back. He stares up at John, his blue eyes brilliant against the red of the blood, his grip surprisingly reassuring, strong.

He feels Sherlock’s thumb stroke the inside of his wrist.

“John.”

John opens his eyes.

He lies still for a moment, heart pounding, staring up into the darkness.

Sherlock’s fingers on his wrist… they felt so real, the touch startled John awake.

Feeling foolish, feeling mad, he shuts his eyes and speaks to the darkness.

“Sherlock?”

There is no response, only the sound of his heartbeat roaring in his ears.

The disappointment is as bitter as bile in his mouth.

Clenching his fists, he rolls over onto his side, tells himself he’d been stupid; of course, _of course_ , it was just a dream. This is what people had warned him about—the slow slide into madness as he refuses to give up on the impossible chance that Sherlock is alive, that Sherlock will come back.

John pulls his pillow to his chest and digs his fists in, willing his heartbeat back to a slower rhythm.

If he has to choose between madness and giving up on Sherlock, John will choose madness, every time.

***

He swears to himself he won’t go back. It’s too dangerous. His escape last time was far too narrow for him to risk another visit.

And yet, with no news of the third gunman, Sherlock’s work is stagnant. The hours crawl by. He feels the old itch building in him, the longing for something to quiet his mind. But instead of the drug, his longing is fixated on seeing John. He knows he can’t go back, and yet he is certain that if he does not, he will go mad.

And then the solution comes to him. He can spend as much time as he likes at 221B, he only needs to give John a light dosage of a mild sedative to ensure he won’t wake up. It’s a matter of only a few hours work to concoct the type of solution he requires.

The first night he tests it out he keeps his distance. He waits until John has slipped into stage three sleep, and then stealing to his side, he sticks the syringe in John’s arm, as quick as a cat striking. 

He watches John carefully to study the effects of the drug, notices his accelerated heart rate, his agitation, his body turning. At the end of the night, he cannot resist telling John that he’s all right, and he knows John’s eyes looking at him blurred with the effects of the drug can’t really see him, but he hopes (despite his better judgment) that the memory will stay with John after he wakes.

***

The next time it happens, John comes down with a fever in his sleep.

He goes to bed feeling fine, but wakes a few hours later, hot and shaking, his mouth as dry as paper. When he tries to get up for a glass of water, he finds he is too sick to rise from the bed. 

He falls back into a fitful sleep and his dreams that night are dark and strange. As he dreams his body is slowly overcome with a restless ache. Fractured bits of images assault him, pieces of memories—some of them sharp and horrible, others soft and reassuring.

He dreams that he is in a dark wood, stumbling, lost. The canopy is so thick overhead it could be daylight and he wouldn’t know. The tangled undergrowth between the trees catches at his ankles, seems to snarl. He is filled with an inexplicable terror. Then he sees Sherlock, pale, paler than usual, standing calmly between the trees clad only in a sheet. “Come with me, John. No need to panic. This is what I look like dead.”

He turns over and over, limbs burning, attempting to wake himself, but each reality shifts into another dream.

He sees Sherlock looking at him in the mirror over the fireplace the day of Moriarty’s trial, his blue eyes grave—then Sherlock is sitting beside him in a cab, watching him without speaking as they ride along, rain sluicing down the grey glass of the windows—then they are in the lab at St. Bart’s and Sherlock continues to watch him with the same unnerving scrutiny, saying nothing, just looking and looking at John.

He dreams that Sherlock climbs in through his bedroom window, barefoot, trailing his bloody scarf, and crouches over John as he sleeps, watching him, studying him with a furrowed brow.

“’M not your microscope, Sherlock,” he slurs, but when he turns over to look at Sherlock, it’s Moriarty standing over him, leering, his black eyes rolling in his head.

John tries to sit up, tries to yell, but his body is unresponsive. He can feel himself sweating and trembling with rage only to realize his eyes are still closed and when he opens them again, he is standing in the graveyard with Mrs. Hudson, but it isn’t Sherlock’s name on the headstone, it is his own. Looking down at his gloved hands, he realizes that he is Sherlock, somehow, and there are tears running down his face. It is the strangest sensation to be both himself and Sherlock at once. He wants to reassure himself (Sherlock?) that it’s all right, that he isn’t dead, but before he can say anything, the dream shifts again. 

He is back in his own bedroom and John feels the breeze from the open window on his wet cheeks and calls out for Sherlock to shut it. There is a strange smell—damp and sweet—like freshly turned soil, and rolling over John finds Sherlock lying alongside him, wearing the suit they buried him in, dried blood streaking his temples, watching John with the same intent expression as before.

“It’s alright, John. I’m alright.”

John makes a strangled sound and tries to sit up but once again finds his arms and legs utterly unresponsive. He can’t move, he can’t speak—he stares at Sherlock, shaking, his eyes filling with tears.

And then Sherlock is sliding away from him into the darkness—or is he sliding away from Sherlock?—either way, the movement makes him dizzy, so he shuts his eyes, groaning, and lets the darkness swallow him whole.

***

When at last he wakes, it is late in the morning. Full daylight streams in through his bedroom windows.

He sits up slowly, mindful of his pounding head, and immediately regrets the action. The room spins around him.

He feels awful—worse than after any night of drinking he’s experienced (and John has done some heavy drinking in his day)—but the ache in his body is gone and he no longer feels the burn of fever.

He crawls out of bed and makes a pot of coffee, which he drinks only after swallowing several pints of water, and feels somewhat back to normal by the time Mrs. Hudson comes upstairs to check on him. She’s gotten into a habit of checking on him more often these days. Her worry for John seems to be on a steady incline as the days pass and John’s grief shows no sign of lessening.

“Are you all right, dear? You look awfully peaky.”

He flashes her the ghost of a smile. “I’m fine. Just had a bit of a fever last night.”

“Oh dear. I suppose you would know if there was anything to worry about, being a doctor and all.” 

She looks worried so John tries his attempt at a smile again. Mistake. He sees her visibly recoil at the expression on his face.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Alright dear, I’ll leave you to it. Give us a shout if you need anything.”

She is almost out the door when John calls back to her. “Mrs. Hudson? You didn’t notice anything strange last night, did you? Any strange sounds? Like someone coming in and out of the flat?”

Her face reemerges in the doorway and she looks doubly worried. “No, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”

“Right. Just thought I’d ask. Never mind.”

She continues to look at him with very real concern. “I’ll bring up some tea this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Mrs. H.”

She hurries out of the room and John marvels that even her footsteps going downstairs can sound concerned.

***

The next several nights pass without incident.

John fights hard against the disappointment that emerges as a result of this and fails. After all, they are only dreams, arguably no less disturbing than his reoccurring nightmare. But that’s just it. They are nothing like his nightmare. There’s something about them, some quality John can’t put his finger on—the only way he can describe it to himself is that they _feel_ different. 

Not exactly an impressive line of deductive reasoning. John puts his face in his hands. It’s no use thinking about it. He isn’t going to get anywhere trying to figure it out. Not without Sher—

John freezes.

How? How is it possible that the pain can be just as bad now as the day it happened? That the feeling of being broken open, of his world shattering, can be enacted again and again every time he remembers?

It’s because he can’t accept it, can’t exist from moment to moment with the reality in his mind, so he shuts it out, forms a bubble around himself, waiting and hoping and waiting for Sherlock to come back. 

Every time he’s forced to remember, it’s like losing Sherlock all over again.

Panic floods him. 

He feels his lungs tighten and John forces his head down between his knees, struggling to draw breath. Darkness crowds in at the corners of his vision. 

When he comes back to himself, he is on the floor in front of the fireplace, his knee twisted under him. He stays like that for several moments, ignoring the flare of pain from the twisted knee, his face pressed to the carpet, feeling shame and anger roll over him in waves.

_Hurry up, Sherlock. Whatever it is you’re doing, you’ve got to hurry up because I can’t take much more of this._

It takes a great deal of effort for him to climb to his feet. As he does so, wincing, he feels old, old beyond his years, and for the first time he wonders with a kind of cold speculation how much longer he can hold out—how many days he’ll last before he’s forced to give up.

***

That night, the fevered sleep finds him again.

Again, he dreams of the open window—a green scent, like rain and growing things engulfs him, and he turns towards it, aching with a longing that goes deeper than the ache of the fever, and he feels his forehead bathed in cool air.

He dreams that he and Sherlock are on a desert island—cartoonishly small, but beautiful in the piercing, impossible way that only images in dreams can have—the sand so white it hurts John’s eyes, the sea a glittering expanse of turquoise stretching as far as the eye could see.

Sherlock is restless, pacing the narrow stretch of sand with nervous, agitated strides, lost in thought, fingers steepled against his mouth. He seems immune to the heat of the place dressed in his wool coat and scarf, his dark hair cool against his forehead.

John, on the other hand, is burning up. Sweat crawls down the back of his neck—his shirt is soaked through. The thirst he feels is like a knife in his throat. He wants to ask Sherlock something but he can’t get the words out.

Abruptly Sherlock stops and looks at him. “You’ll have to swim for it. It’s the only way.”

Delirious, John shakes his head. 

“You’re already half dead from dehydration. You’ve got to leave _now_.”

The words take real effort. “I’m not going without you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sherlock snaps. “You have to go alone.”

“I won’t.”

“ _John_.” His voice is a growl.

John’s own rage swells to match Sherlock’s. His voice rises to a shout. “If you think I’m going to leave you here on this bloody island by yourself, then you’ve got another thing coming!”

Sherlock’s eyes seem to have taken on the color of the ocean behind him. He brings his face right down to John’s, turquoise eyes sparking. “Would you prefer to die here with me instead?”

“Yes!”

Sherlock falls back as if he’s been struck.

The effort of shouting costs him. John feels the sweat running like a river down his back. Sherlock is right. He isn’t going to last much longer. It’s taking all his energy to remain standing.

Sensing this, Sherlock comes forward and takes hold of John by his upper arms. His grip is firm but gentle, blue eyes softening as he looks into John’s. “John, listen to me. It’s my fault you’re here at all. You wouldn’t be in danger if it weren’t for me. I won’t let you die on my account. Do you understand?”

He wants to fight back, to argue. _Don’t I get a say in this? I’m the one who chose to follow you to this bloody island and I’m choosing to stay!_ But he is beyond speech. His head rolls on his neck and then he is sliding to the sand, Sherlock’s hands still on his arms.

“John? John!”

John tries to focus on Sherlock’s face but the landscape around him is running like hot wax. He watches as the blue of the ocean slides into the blue of the sky. The sand is hot, too hot on his skin. 

“John? John, can you hear me?”

He hears Sherlock muttering from what sounds like a long way away, real panic in his voice. “Too high of a dosage,” and then Sherlock is shaking him by the arms.

“John, listen to me. You’ve got stay awake for me, all right? Don’t fall asleep. We’ve got to cool you down. I’m going to help you to the water.”

John’s fingers tense on Sherlock’s arms but he’s too weak to protest. Sherlock is wrong. He’s burning up from the inside. Nothing can help him. 

“Put your arms around my neck.”

The movement of Sherlock sliding an arm under his shoulders is enough to make the world heave around him. The colors of the island flicker into darkness. John shuts his eyes.

“Hold on. Hold on. It isn’t far now.”

***

John is burning up. The fire is eating him from the inside. Sherlock thinks water will cool him down; he’s wrong. It isn’t just the heat of a fever or a tropical sun; it’s the heat of his rage, of his despair that knows no end.

The water on his skin is cool—it soothes the burning and John sinks into it with heady relief. But the rage is still there at the center of him, filling him with white heat, and when his head breaks the surface, he reaches out in anger, terrified and furious that Sherlock will keep him clinging to life, only to leave him again.

His hands find Sherlock’s arms, close around them, and he is pulling Sherlock to him with a terrible strength, using his body to communicate what his voice cannot. _Don’t you dare leave me._

He hears Sherlock’s gasp of surprise and then his body is covering John’s, shifting his hands so that it is Sherlock who takes hold of his wrists, pushing them up above his head, stilling them.

He is trembling from head to foot, shaking with the force of his anger—he wants to strike out at Sherlock, to hurt him for what he’s done. Sherlock seems to sense this; that the power of his rage is equal to that of a caged animal, starved and wounded. He lays his body over John’s, half in and out of the water, and lowers his mouth to John’s ear.

“It’s alright. You’re all right now.”

John bellows like he’s been struck and Sherlock tenses over him, the grip on his wrists unfaltering. His breath is a plume of heat against John’s wet ear. 

“I’m sorry.” The pain in Sherlock’s voice catches him off guard. It reaches down and catches something in his chest and _pulls_. “I’m so sorry, John. Forgive me. Can you forgive me?”

John makes a strangled sound and then his arms are tightening around Sherlock’s shoulders and he is sobbing with an abandon he has never allowed himself.

Sherlock’s arms come up around him and hold him in a vice-like grip. He can feel Sherlock’s mouth against his neck, murmuring soothing things, though he can’t hear them over the sound of his own sobs.

His voice, when he finally finds it, is a rasp of desperation. “Never,” he grates out, his fingers moving up to clutch at Sherlock’s hair. “ _Never_ do that to me again.”

Sherlock’s sigh should worry him, but the exhalation of Sherlock’s breath against his skin feels so good, so _real_ , he ignores the sorrow in it. “I’m not—John, I’m dead.”

Sherlock’s weight against him is reassuringly heavy. John shifts his legs to settle Sherlock more snugly against him.

“No, you’re not. You’re right here.”

Sherlock’s mouth is moving, warm and soft, over the tendons in his throat, following his pulse.

“You’re dreaming.”

John lifts his chin, stretching his head back to give Sherlock better access to his neck. The world is still hazy around him. Opening his eyes and looking up, he sees blue, blue stretching on and on above him into infinity. Funny, a moment ago, he could have sworn he’d seen bathroom tiles.

“If I’m dreaming, then how can I do this?”

Using his hold in Sherlock’s hair, he pulls Sherlock’s mouth to his and kisses him.

Sherlock’s mouth is impossibly soft, his gasp of surprise as sweet as honey to the starving center at the heart of John. He tugs Sherlock down with him into the water, opening his eyes briefly to take in the shocked blue of Sherlock’s gaze. 

Sherlock is breathless from the kiss. “What are you doing?”

“Something I always meant to do when you were alive. I’m not going to miss the opportunity again.”

Then it’s Sherlock’s turn to kiss him back, uttering a cry of anguish that goes through John like a knife before his mouth descends on John’s, matching the heat of John’s passion with his own, fingers coming up to hold John’s head so gently, at odds with the desperate hunger of his mouth, now working its way down John’s neck, kissing all the places where his pulse beats hot and frantic.

“Sherlock.” John is saying his name, just to hear it from his own lips. “Sherlock.” His fingers grip so hard in Sherlock’s hair, he moans, sliding his body down the length of John’s to touch his trembling mouth to every part of him.

John can feel the pull of the waves as they lap over him and the taste of salt in his mouth, but that could be the taste of Sherlock—green and fresh and living—his skin warm and slippery under John’s fingers. His perception of the world has narrowed to Sherlock’s hands, his mouth.

Together they sink beneath the surface of the water, Sherlock twined around him like an eel, his dark hair drifting in a smudge around his head, his pale skin luminous, rippling in the mottled light. John’s laughter is a stream of bubbles as he pulls Sherlock to him. “So in your afterlife you become a sea serpent?”

Sherlock pulls John’s mouth to his, eyes suddenly serious. “Don’t try and speak down here.” He puts his mouth on John’s, breathing air, breathing life into his lungs. “Breathe into me. Don’t let go.”

The lights go strange, the world blurring around him. John’s arms close once more around Sherlock’s neck—he’s disoriented, darkness threatens the corners of his vision. He feels the drag of sand under him and then Sherlock’s hands are patting him dry, strangely tender, one hand stopping to rest on John’s forehead.

“You’ll be alright now. Go to sleep, John.”

He can hear his own shallow breathing, can feel the water beading on his skin, tries to speak, to say Sherlock’s name.

“Don’t.” The hand smoothes his damp hair once, then lifts away into the darkness. “You need to sleep.”

John cries out and lifts his hands but they close on air. Sudden terror grips him but he can’t fight the darkness stealing over him, smothering his eyes, his voice, until he knows no more.

***

Sherlock’s entry through the door of the lab is like an explosion. 

Molly looks up from the book she’s reading, lowers her glasses. “How did it go?”

“Badly, Molly! Not well at all.”

“What happened?”

“He kissed me, Molly! John kissed me.”

“Oh.” Molly tries to hide the quirk of amusement in her mouth and fails. 

Sherlock begins pacing the narrow space. 

“How was it?”

“What?”

“How was the kiss?”

“It was—well, I don’t know! He was drugged! It was…surprisingly forceful for someone who’d been sedated. He grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go.”

“Did you kiss him back?” 

Molly seems far too amused by this story. He turns on her with savage intensity. Molly doesn’t even flinch. Sherlock resumes pacing. “I—yes! Against my better judgment, I did!”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

“How is it all right? I _drugged him _, Molly! There is no aspect of this situation that could ever be considered ‘all right’!”__

Molly’s voice is quiet. “I could have told you it was a bad idea.”

Sherlock sits abruptly on the room’s only chair, his body sagging with sudden weariness.

“I know. I know. You would have been right.” He puts his face in his hands.

Molly waits until Sherlock begins speaking again through his fingers.

“He had a bad reaction to the drug. He got overheated. I had to get him in the bath to cool him down. As soon as he was in the water, he reached for me. He pulled me into the bath.” He’s half-laughing at the memory, at John’s impossible strength. “I should have expected something like this. Even drugged, John’s not likely to forgive me for any of this. He grabbed onto me like he knew I was going to leave him again. And then he kissed me.”

Sherlock shuts his eyes.

Minutes pass and Molly doesn’t want to break his reverie but she’s too curious to wait.

“What happened then?”

Sherlock’s eyes flutter open—the look on his face like someone coming out of a trance.

“He got… confused. He was hallucinating, trying to breathe underwater. I had to pull him out of the tub and get him dry. I stayed with him until the effects wore off. He’s all right now. Even if he feels like death today.” Sherlock rubs his face. “I can’t go back, Molly. I can’t do that to him again.”

Sherlock’s voice is raw with pain and once again, Molly is astounded that John has managed to reach this man the way that he has. No one else ever will.

“This is the end. From now on, I’ll stay away.”

***

John wakes to darkness.

His mind explodes into panic. He has no recollection of time or place. Where is he? How much time has passed since he went to sleep? He gropes for the bedside table and switches on the light. Some of his panic recedes as he recognizes his bedroom at 221B—and then all at once memories rush him from the night before, fractured and bizarre, shocking him like a burst of ice-cold water.

He remembers heat. The burning sensation of a fever, the familiar ache he experienced a few nights earlier, and then the same uncanny feeling that a window had opened in his room, bringing with it cool air, and the strange smell of spring in the middle of a London winter.

He remembers an island—white light, bright water. Sherlock in his coat and scarf, pacing the sand. Sherlock furious, seizing hold of him, telling him to save himself. He remembers yelling back. 

John put his hands over his eyes, his heart pounding. It’s difficult to think past the pain in his head. 

The rest is a blur—the memories flickering in and out like images on a poorly focused projector. He remembers falling, and then Sherlock’s arms around him, lowering him into water—he remembers vividly the sensation of being in water—and the terror that Sherlock would leave him again. He wanted to break his nose, but instead he’d kissed him. John had kissed him.

John lowers his shaking hands to his mouth and holds them there. The shock at what he has done is overshadowed by the shocking clarity of the memories. John has had vivid nightmares before.

_This wasn’t a nightmare._

John shivers now at the memory of all that heat. His bed feels cold and the air in the room seems stale by comparison—in the gloom the curtains at the window look like the shrouds on a sepulcher. 

He glances down at himself for a sign that any of it was real, as if his body would bear some mark to confirm that Sherlock’s hands, his mouth had been there. Certain details he remembers so vividly—Sherlock’s breath at his ear, his fingers holding John’s shoulders hard enough to bruise, the burning sand under him before Sherlock lifted him up. 

What happened last night? The clock on his nightstand says it’s 6pm. He’s been out for hours. This is the second time he’s come down with a fever in his sleep. There is no discernible reason for it. No discernible reason why he should wake the next morning feeling sick, feeling exhausted, feeling like… 

Feeling like he’s been drugged.

John sits up, his sluggish mind suddenly alert. Kicking blankets aside he struggles to his feet. He has to reach for the wall as dizziness assails him. His body is still reluctant to obey his commands.

John waits for the dizziness to pass, his whole body trembling, whether from fatigue or adrenaline he isn’t sure. He goes over to the window and checks the latches. They are all locked, sealed from the inside. No matter. Something about the drama of coming in through the window seems like it would appeal to Sherlock, but he could have just as easily strolled in through the front door. 

He pads down the hallway and into the bathroom. His memories of the water seem too real to have been invented, and if he really had been overheated from the drug— _Too high of a dosage_ —the fastest way to cool him down would have been to immerse him in cold water.

He inspects the floor of the bathroom for any hint of water but finds none. He runs his finger all around the rim of the tub, checking for moisture. It’s dry. He looks in the linen closet, but all the towels are as they should be, stacked and neatly folded.

He pulls out his flashlight—it takes him a minute to remember where it is, it’s been so long since he’s used it—and walks the length of the hallway inspecting the wood for damp footprints, water marks, any sign of a drip. He finds nothing.

It doesn’t prove anything. If there is anyone who knows how to avoid leaving evidence, it’s Sherlock Holmes. 

John goes down into the living room, cold seeping up from the floor into his bare feet. Mrs. Hudson has clearly come and gone. There is a stack of bills on the edge of the table that wasn’t there the day before and a small vase with a spray of white flowers on the desk. 

Something in John lurches at the sight of them. The flowers are something she never would have done in Sherlock’s day—he wouldn’t have tolerated them in the first place and there was hardly room for them on any available surface what with the clutter of Sherlock’s experiments. He feels an intense urge to throw the vase against the wall, to hear it shatter, to watch the water running down the ruined wallpaper, but he checks himself. He’s better than that. Chucking vases is more Sherlock’s style.

At the memory of Sherlock, heaviness comes over him, seems to drag him down with the weight of his grief, at the sharp reminder that Sherlock is gone, gone, and John’s little charade at playing the consulting detective is nothing more than a sad man’s pathetic attempt to dodge his own grief. He takes several blind steps backwards until he reaches his chair, sinking into it with sudden fatigue.

_Sherlock is dead. He’s dead. Seeing him in your dreams is normal. That’s fine. But if you wake up insisting the dreams are real…_

But they had to be real. None of the physiological explanations make sense. It isn’t just the strange dreams, it’s the fever, the extended sleep, and the way John’s body feels upon waking, the way his mind feels sluggish, the fractured nature of his memories. John gets up out of the chair and begins to pace the room.

Sherlock had drugged John before; he would have no qualms about doing it again. Especially if he doesn’t want John to know he is alive. But if Sherlock is alive why would he need to hide from John? It doesn’t make sense. There has to be a reason, a reason, why Sherlock has to stay away, why he has to pretend to be dead, why he doesn’t want John to know.

Moriarty is dead, that much is certain. They found his body on the roof of Bart’s that day, a gun in his hand. The papers claimed Sherlock had shot him and then put the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide before he jumped. But that was sloppy reporting. Sherlock’s name had already been ruined. He was one step away from death, why would he care whether people knew he’d murdered the man who claimed to be Richard Brook?

John didn’t go up to the roof that day. He wasn’t able to do much of anything other than hold the splintered pieces of himself together. He didn’t have the peace of mind to think of details, the details that now, looking back, he realizes don’t make any kind of sense.

The larger not making sense of it all eclipsed the minor details for John. He can’t accept—it does _not_ make sense that Sherlock would give in to Moriarty’s plan and jump to his death. There is no part of John that believes Sherlock’s admission of Moriarty’s lies. _That_ is beyond the realm of impossible, but then why, _why_ would Sherlock have given in? What could Moriarty possibly have said or done to compel Sherlock to jump?

These are all the questions that John did not allow himself to consider in the months immediately following Sherlock’s death. The shock was too great—he couldn’t stand to think about that day, much less ponder the details surrounding the event. Thinking of it now he is ashamed to admit that he gave up so soon. In any other scenario, it would have been he and Sherlock prowling the roof of St. Bart’s together, taking note of the position of Moriarty’s body, the expression on his face, the direction the blood had pooled when it left his head. Now all of that is lost to John and he has no data to help him puzzle out why Moriarty killed himself, and how he can still hold sway over Sherlock, even in death.

Moriarty was always more than just a man—Sherlock called him a spider in the middle of a giant web. Just because the spider is gone doesn’t mean the web has not survived. There is obviously some reason why Sherlock needs Moriarty’s operatives to believe him dead, some untangling he needs to do before he can come back.

Rage blooms sharp and hot in the center of John’s chest. That’s all well and good but how long does Sherlock expect him to wait before his pretend death sentence is up? And then a dark thought occurs to him, extinguishing the heat of his rage like a draft snuffing a flame—maybe Sherlock doesn’t plan on coming back. Maybe he plans to spend the rest of his days in hiding, hunting Moriarty’s criminal network on his own until there is nothing left.

John sets his jaw. He isn’t going to give Sherlock the opportunity to leave him behind for good, especially not if he insists on visiting John in the dead of night and drugging him to persuade him it’s all a dream.

The next time Sherlock comes, John will be ready for him.

***

And so he is. 

The problem is Sherlock shows no sign of coming back.

At first it’s fine. It stands to reason that Sherlock won’t risk drugging John again so soon after it went so badly. John expects several days to pass without another visit. His renewed conviction that Sherlock is alive gives a burst of energy and almost normalcy to his life. It’s easier to go about day-to-day tasks without the same sinister gloom, because now it’s just like Sherlock is out on an annoyingly long jaunt and instead of devastating despair, John feels only intense irritation that Sherlock would consider lying to him about his own death. 

He passes the time rehearsing the very stern lecture he plans to give to Sherlock about the social incorrectness of faking your own suicide and tricking your best friend. 

As juvenile as it feels to do so, John booby-traps the flat. He strings a piece of fishing line across the doorway to his room on which he affixes a tiny bell. It’s thin enough and low enough that it’s difficult to make out, especially in the dark. He used this method to great effect when he was a boy to keep Harry out of his room.

He hangs a string of bells on each of the windows in his bedroom, so that they make a furious racket when opened. He pries up a corner of one of the floorboards at the foot of his bed so that if someone walks around his bed in the darkness they will surely trip. His system isn’t very sophisticated but he has made it thorough enough so that there really is no way to enter John’s room without making a great deal of noise.

He leaves the living room untouched—he doesn’t want Mrs. Hudson tripping over one of his improvised Sherlock-catching traps. He also doesn’t want to deal with the concerned round of questions that will inevitably follow such a discovery. Luckily, she never ventures up to the third floor where John’s room is, so he restricts his system of alarms to his room.

If Mrs. Hudson notices his sudden shift of mood, she doesn’t say anything about it. There was a rather awkward encounter by the front door one afternoon when John came in with his shopping bags full of bells jangling like a Salvation Army Santa at Christmas. With a curt, “Afternoon, Mrs. Hudson,” John hurried up the stairs past her before she could ask him why he was purchasing Christmas decorations in January. However, he did not escape the significantly worried look she sent his way. If anything, these days she is treating John more cautiously than ever. 

More vases of tiny flowers appear around the flat, but not even their bland cheerfulness can dampen John’s mood. Now when John sees them, he smirks to himself, imagining Sherlock’s incensed reaction when he comes back and discovers his laboratory equipment replaced by floral decor. 

But as the days trickle by and there is still no sign of Sherlock, John begins to worry. 

Sleep becomes impossible.

Every time he shuts his eyes he is convinced that someone is in the room. His ears become hyper-attuned to the sounds of his bedroom at night and he can’t stop himself from studying the shadows at the end of his bed, under the window, in the recess by the door; anywhere that someone might potentially conceal oneself is like a magnet for John’s eyes. 

If sleep was difficult before due to his recurring nightmares, it’s now a minefield of traumatic memories. Not only does he continue to have the same nightmare of Sherlock falling, he has what feels like flashbacks to his drug-induced dreams. Sometimes he wakes up drenched in sweat, convinced Sherlock has drugged him again only to realize the heat he feels was only in his dream. Other times he dreams so vividly of being in the water that he is sure upon waking he will find himself in the bath. The memories of his dreams after he has woken are so vivid he begins to wonder if he simply invented the other memories after all.

Lack of sleep begins to make him doubt his senses even when he is awake. His mind plays tricks on him constantly. Time and again he wakes up to the sound of bells ringing only to realize that the sound came from his dream. He sees movement out of the corner of his eyes and he will turn toward it with intention only to realize it’s the silhouette of trees outside moving in the wind, or the lights from a car passing below in the street. 

He is slowing losing all ability to distinguish between reality and dreams.

When his dreams aren’t nightmares, or flashbacks to his drug-induced sleep, they are filled with strange dark images. He dreams of Sherlock dressed in leaves, climbing into bed with him, his hands on John’s body cold as the grave; Sherlock with moldering white wings, on the back of a giant wolf; he and Sherlock in a boat on a black river, pulled along by a figure in a hooded cloak. Looking into the water, John can see his own face staring back at him, like a pale light shining up from the depths.

“Don’t touch the water.”

Shocked by the sound of Sherlock’s voice, John nearly falls out of the boat.

“Why not?”

“This is Lethe, where the souls of the dead drink to forget their past lives. Lucky for you they haven’t made me drink it yet.”

John hears the grin in Sherlock’s voice but when he looks up, instead of Sherlock’s face he sees the naked jawbone of a skull, the empty sockets of his eyes as black as the black water all around.

***

Sherlock is true to his word. He keeps well away from Baker Street, ignoring the ache at the center of him that throbs like a blister of pain where his heart should be. Anytime the desire to go back overcomes him he remembers the grip of John’s hands, how much he hated himself when he had to pull away.

It’s been two months when finally he gets word of the third gunman. Mycroft comes to see him. Sherlock knows the news is bad because Mycroft comes in person. He stands in the doorway of Sherlock’s storage closet, his face grim, umbrella tucked neatly under one arm, like the messenger of death. “He’s got his eye on John. He seems to know, Sherlock, that you’re not dead.”

They sent Mycroft a note. “Tell your little brother if he wants his friend to live he should come to us. No more games. We’ll give him 48 hours.” 

Sherlock isn’t going to give himself up, he’s going to kill the man before he gets a chance, but before he goes, just in case something goes wrong, he’s got to make sure John is safe—has to make certain John leaves the city.

As soon as Mycroft leaves, he prepares the drug again, lessening the dosage to be sure he doesn’t repeat the same mistake. John must be disoriented enough to doubt his senses but it’s imperative that he remembers all that transpired when he wakes.

Molly watches Sherlock work, his pale face hovering in a cloud of smoke above the steaming crucible. She wants to tell him not to go, that it won’t work. He can’t play the guardian angel anymore; not when he refuses to show himself, but he’s so terrified, so desperate to keep John safe, she doesn’t have the heart to do it.

***

That night John dreams of smoke. 

He finds himself in what could have been a forest, but instead of trees, he walks between pillars of light. Tendrils of heat creep out from them, bringing warmth to his hands, his face, but when he tries to touch them his fingers close on air. They are like the ghosts of trees. Smoke hangs in heavy coils between them, curled around them like vines. He thinks of forest fires, the brittle skeletons of burned branches and wonders if this place is a graveyard for trees. 

When he hears the sound of bells ringing as clear and sweet as sunlight, he tries to sit up but finds he cannot wake himself.

The forest of smoke vanishes. Panic grips him like an iron fist. He knows he has to wake up—can’t remember why but knows, _knows_ he has to be awake. The bells are like a shot of adrenaline. He struggles against the invisible weight that’s settled in his limbs, moaning with the effort; fights to open his eyes but he can’t tell if he’s succeeded since all he sees is darkness stretching endlessly on in front of him.

“John. I need you to concentrate.”

He is certain now that his eyes are open, although he can see nothing but the shadows on his bedroom ceiling. They look like the tangled branches of trees.

“John, can you hear me?”

The voice in darkness is as clear as daylight.

“Nod if you can hear me.”

John nods.

“I need you to remember what I’m telling you when you wake. Do you understand? Nod for me, John, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Furious, shaking, John nods his head.

“Good. First, understand that I'm dead. I’m dead and I’m not coming back. Second—and John, it’s imperative that you do as I ask—you have to leave Baker Street.”

John shakes his head.

“You’re not safe here anymore. You’ve got to leave.”

“No…” Speech is difficult. Slurred. “Won’t… leave.”

“John, you’ve got to give up on me. I’m not coming back.”

John feels anger burning in him, a terrible, gnawing anger that spreads through his limbs, inciting them to action. He still can’t sit up, but he can make out a figure looming over him in the darkness, a tall, Sherlock-shaped figure backlit by the grey light from the windows.

“I’m not leaving.”

The figure swoops down on him and takes hold of his shoulders. His grip feels solid, real. “You’ve got to! John, listen to me. When have I ever asked anything of you?”

As John stares up at him in incredulous fury, he swears he can make out the wince of regret on Sherlock’s face at his choice of words.

“Never mind, forget I said that. This time it actually matters. All of those other things, none of them mattered. This, _this_ , matters, do you understand?”

“How dare you?” John struggles upright, sweating from the effort. “You’re a ghost!” He’s shouting now. “Why should I believe you if you’re dead? Why would you come back here, if you’re _dead_?” 

“Because I care what happens to you, and because you’re in danger, John, _please_. You’ve got to believe me.”

Sherlock has fallen to his knees beside the bed. His face—from what John can see—looks gaunt, under-fed. He wants to be cruel to Sherlock in that moment, wants to hurt him for making him doubt all this time, for leaving him. Whether he is dead or not, John is furious all the same.

“No. No! you can’t make demands of me, not after what you did! Not when you’re still doing it, right now. You tricked me, Sherlock. You tricked me and then you drugged me! You’re drugging me now! How could you do that to me? How could you make me think you’re dead? And then come back here, as a ghost, and make demands of me? How _dare_ you?”

This speech leaves him breathless. His rage has drained the energy out of him. The room lurches around him like a ship at sea. He no longer trusts what his eyes are showing him—the repentant look on Sherlock’s face must be a hallucination.

“I know. I know, but please John, in spite of all that, _promise me_ you’ll leave Baker Street. Promise me.”

Now Sherlock’s face is rippling as though John is watching him through water.

Desperation seizes him. “No… you’re doing it again! Don’t.”

With tremendous effort, John swings his legs over the side of the bed.

“I can’t stay, John, but remember what I said. Remember.”

“No.”

And then he’s gone and the darkness is trying to swallow John whole but he fights against it, teeth bared, fists striking out. He makes it to his door, to the top of the stairs, and he’s shouting Sherlock’s name, furious.

“Come back! Come back.” He’s falling to his knees, shaking, yelling at the top of his lungs. “Godammit, Sherlock! I know you’re there. Come back, you _bastard_! Don’t leave me here!”

A light comes on downstairs; hurried footsteps on the stairs, raised voices calling his name. He is insensible to this. It’s not Sherlock. He’s left him again and John is howling with his rage.

The last thing he remembers: Mrs. Hudson trying to help him to his feet, draping a blanket over his shoulders, her terrified face.

***

The next morning, the city of London is white, its harsh edges softened under a blanket of snow. It’s beautiful. Baker Street is transformed into a Christmas card of snow filigreed onto wrought-iron balconies, laughing children dragging sleighs down the center of the street before the plough comes.

John spends the morning scouring the front step of 221B for footprints from last night, but only finds one set—clearly the postman’s. He barges into Mrs. Hudson’s flat without knocking. “When did it start snowing?”

Mrs. Hudson eyes him nervously, a mug of tea in each hand. “I don’t know, dear. I think it may have started early this morning.”

John swears. Had it started snowing before Sherlock came, he would have left clear footprints; he could have showed them all.

Mrs. Hudson sets the mugs on the table. “Why not sit down and have a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson, I don’t want tea at the moment. I’m trying to get to the bottom of something and I need—”

“About last night.” She interrupts him, looking briefly startled by her own audacity. “I think…perhaps, it would be best if you went back to see your psychiatrist again. In fact, I took the liberty of scheduling an appointment for you this morning.”

John looks at her, stunned.

“Ella Thompson, isn’t it?”

“How did you…?”

If she didn’t already look so apologetic, John would be furious. 

“I looked in your diary, dear. I’m sorry! It’s just… after last night I was so worried. I called her this morning. Asked if she might be able to fit you in.”

John flexes the fingers of his left hand, takes a deep breath.

“It isn’t right that you’re still suffering like this. You need help, dear. It’s for the best! Really, it is.”

John frowns briefly and then nods. “Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. I appreciate the thought but—”

“The appointment’s at eleven.”

At the look she’s giving him, John sighs. He knows he terrified her last night. Perhaps it’s only fair that he give her a little peace of mind in exchange for the horror of remaining her tenant for the last six months. He’s been worse than Sherlock at his worst moments.

“Thank you, Mrs. H.” He nods again. “I won’t miss it.”

Relief floods her face.

“Thank goodness. Now sit down and have some tea, it will do you good.”

***

John gets into a cab at 10:30 and leaves for the appointment with Mrs. Hudson’s best interests at heart. However, he knows even before he sets foot in the room that he won’t be able to stay. 

“Now tell me… what’s been happening since our last appointment?"

He sits in the chair as still as stone.

"How have things been?”

John looks at her. “You received a phone call from my landlady this morning that she found me out of bed in the middle of the night raving my head off like a lunatic screaming at my dead friend. You know how it’s been.”

She pauses. “Yes, but I want to hear from your perspective. How are you doing?”

John deliberates for a moment about how long he’s willing to draw this out. He decides he doesn’t have the patience. “He’s not dead. He’s been coming to the house at night and drugging me in my sleep.”

“John—”

“He isn’t dead.”

“Mrs. Hudson says you’ve been having trouble sleeping. If you’re seeing him at night, you’re dreaming, John.”

“No.”

She leans forward in her chair, her face intent. “It’s only rational for you to expect Sherlock to be alive. You had unfinished business with him. Your psyche is conjuring him up because it wants to make it right, to give you the opportunity to say the things you didn’t get to say.”

“No.” John shakes his head. “No, I saw him. He was there.” 

“Most accounts of people seeing ghosts are people from life who they had strong emotional connections to. If you think of ghosts as collections of memories, as impressions they left on the people they loved—”

John stands up abruptly. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

He crosses the room to the door and goes through it without looking back. 

***

He doesn’t hail a cab. He can’t stand to sit still anymore. His rage is like a live current inside him, filling him with restless energy.

It takes him almost two hours to walk home. As he crosses Blackfriar's Bridge a fine rain begins to fall, turning the morning’s remaining snow to slush underfoot. Tongues of mist rise out of the river, distorting the shapes of people and buildings around him. It blurs the edges of things erasing the boundaries that normally help the visual world make sense. Figures in dark coats move past and seem to float along the pavement. If he squints his eyes, any of those figures could be Sherlock. 

He hasn’t dressed for the weather. Rain is running down the back of John’s neck and he’s reminded sharply of the feeling of sweat on his skin from his dream of the island. He suddenly feels hot in spite of his soaking jacket.

A man walking past clips John on the shoulder with his umbrella. “Sorry, chap.” As he turns away to continue walking John catches a glimpse of his face—pale skin, sharp cheekbones, high forehead.

John freezes. For a moment, the rain drenched bridge shimmers around him. Then he turns on the spot, shouting. “Sherlock! Sherlock!”

He tears back the way he came, pushing between people, eyes scanning the crowd for a glimpse of the same dark coat. He looks into each face coming toward him, searching, searching for the familiar features but none of them is Sherlock. He runs the length of the bridge, studying desperately the face of each passerby, looking for anyone in a grey wool coat. He pauses finally, out of breath. The world around him is a sea of coats and umbrellas, indistinguishable from one another. 

“Sherlock!”

People begin to move in a wide detour around him. John considers for a moment how he must look, standing drenched and desperate in the middle of the rainy sidewalk, no umbrella, his furious face streaked with rain.

He knows; he _knows_ what he saw. It was Sherlock. It had to have been.

His eyes continue to flick from face to face as people stream past, but Sherlock has vanished as suddenly as he appeared. 

A wave of fury moves through John, and leaves him shaking and dizzy, suddenly unable to stand upright, reaching like a drowning man for the rail of the bridge. 

***

Sherlock enters the lab in an explosion of rain-drenched fury.

“He went back to Baker Street!”

Molly looks up from the table, taking in the agitation in every line of Sherlock’s body.

“It didn’t work. He went right back to Baker Street and he’s clearly not going to leave. Why is he being so _impossible_?”

Molly hesitates. “Maybe because you’re trying to convince him that you’re dead and he knows you’re not?”

“He saw me on Blackfriar’s Bridge. He knew it was me.” Sherlock drags his fingers through his wet hair; coupled with the frantic, furious expression on his face, it makes him look mad. “You’re right, Molly. I can’t convince him.”

“You’ve got to stop following him like that!” 

She’s angry. Sherlock can hear it in her voice. He turns and looks at her. It occurs to him that he’s never seen Molly angry before. The sight of it is almost enough to distract him from his own anger. Almost.

“Do you know what you’re doing to him? You’ll drive him mad!”

“I know perfectly well what I’m doing to him!” The expression on John’s face when he’d seen Sherlock on the bridge; he had gone from grey to white. “But I’d say mad is better than dead on all accounts!”

Sherlock throws his damp overcoat over a stool and chucks the umbrella underneath. 

“I had to follow him! They forced him to see that idiot of a psychiatrist again.” Sherlock is pacing the room, his shoes leaving wet marks on the linoleum. He laughs in a humorless way. “She tried to convince him I was a ghost. Some rubbish about manifestations of unresolved psychological trauma.”

“You tried to convince him you were a ghost yourself!”

He gives Molly a look. “Yes, but I’m not calling myself a psychiatrist, am I? Besides I had reason to do so.”

He’s walking with his hands folded in front of his mouth, brow deeply furrowed.

“I’ve got to get him out of Baker Street. Now. Today. But how? _How_? He won’t leave the flat for any conceivable reason, not now that he’s convinced I’m coming back. We’ve got to convince him, Molly, _prove_ to him that I’m not coming back.”

He stops dead in his tracks, his gaze falling on Molly. 

“You.”

“What?”

Sherlock drops to his knees in front of her, the speed of his movement alarming. He takes her hands in his.

“You’ve got to go talk to him. The two of you never spoke after my death. You’ve got to tell him, Molly. You’ve got to convince him it was my body. Tell him finally, conclusively that I’m dead.”

“I don’t—” She tries to pull her hands out of Sherlock’s but he hangs on with terrifying strength.

“Molly, you’ve got to do this. You’ve got to convince him.”

Sherlock stares at her. The intensity of his gaze is blinding. She knows in that moment that he won’t let her go until she agrees. How could he ask her to do this to John? How could he stand to do it? She knows the answer even as the question is forming in her mind.

_Because he’ll do anything to keep him safe._

“But… won’t it seem suspicious? Why would I go to him all of a sudden to tell him that? Won’t… won’t he assume I’m working with you?”

“No. John doesn’t know. He…” Sherlock drops his eyes momentarily and when his gaze returns to her face, the blue of his irises is softer than the blinding sharpness of a moment before. “He doesn’t know that I trust you.”

Abruptly, Sherlock lets go of Molly’s hands and rises to his feet. He begins pacing again. “Tell him the psychiatrist sent you. To prove that I’m dead. Tell him you saw the corpse. You examined it. There is no doubt in your mind that it was me.”

“Will you—” Something in Molly’s voice stops Sherlock pacing. He looks at her. “Once this is all over, will you tell him that I didn’t want to do it? That I’d never want to cause him pain?”

“Molly.” Sherlock kneels before her once more and his hands this time are surprisingly gentle. “Molly, when this is all over, you can tell him yourself.”

***

When the buzzer rings downstairs, John assumes it’s someone for Mrs. Hudson, but then when he hears her calling up to him he figures it must be Lestrade. He lifts himself out of his chair with effort and goes to greet him at the door.

He’s shocked to see Molly Hooper coming up the stairs.

She looks smaller than he remembers and more troubled—like life hasn’t been kind to her in the six months since he’s seen her last. Well, he probably doesn’t look as if the last six months have been kind to him either.

He tries to summon up some genuine warmth to impart—he’s always liked Molly; there is something solid about her despite her somewhat fragile appearance and her affection for Sherlock is clearly more than just skin-deep. In a way, he feels a funny kind of affinity with her, as he does with those few people in the world who not only manage to put up with Sherlock, but actually seem to appreciate him, cruelty, lack of social skills, eccentricities and all. It’s a rare person who can see past Sherlock’s often-unpleasant veneer to the hidden depths that lie beneath.

“Molly, come in. Please come in and sit down.”

He gestures to his own chair—he’s taken to sitting in Sherlock’s chair; he can’t bear to see it empty and it feels less lonely if his own chair is unoccupied. 

She sits down without taking off her coat. She looks nervous.

“What can I do for you?”

“Um…” She purses her lips. “I really don’t know how to put this, so I’ll just say it.” She folds her hands in her lap, studies her fingers. “Your therapist called this afternoon. She—she said you’ve been having some difficulty… moving on after… well, accepting… that he’s gone. I—I wouldn’t have come, it’s just that, she insisted it was for your own good.”

He’s surprised to see tears in Molly’s eyes. This can’t be easy for her. She’s always had a big crush on Sherlock.

“I wanted to tell you that I was there, at St. Bart’s, the day it happened. I was there when they wheeled him in.”

“Molly.” He tries to stop her. “You don’t need to do this—”

“I… I had just gotten off my shift. I was on my way out the door when there was a big commotion of people coming in. I went back to see what it was, who it was on the dolly that had caused such a stir.”

She puts a hand over her mouth, takes a moment to collect herself.

“I stayed in the room the whole time, I couldn’t—I had to be sure. I thought it couldn’t be…it’s impossible, but…it was him. I checked myself.” She shuts her eyes. The tear tracks on her face are silver in the light from the window. “It was definitely him.”

John didn’t realize how intently he was listening until she stopped talking. He was waiting for the moment in which there could have been room for a mistake, where Molly could have missed something. Perhaps she didn’t get close enough, perhaps she didn’t see… but she checked the body herself.

“I’m so sorry.” The tears are streaming down her face and for a moment John is jealous, jealous of how easy it is for her to express what she’s feeling. He will never be able to cry like that, not even for Sherlock.

He should tell her something reassuring, should offer her a handkerchief, pat her on the arm, but he can’t speak. There is a cold, dead feeling in the center of his chest that is growing steadily outward. 

Molly Hooper sits across from him and weeps.

Abruptly, he stands up. He nods at her, nods once to show that he’s understood what she came to tell him, and then he walks out of the room.

***

She listens to the sound of his feet going up the stairs—the sound of a dead man walking—and for a moment, Molly is terrified by what she’s done. Sherlock swears it’s necessary, that it’s the only way to get John out of the flat, to keep him safe—but at what cost?

Molly’s knuckles where she grips the arms of the chair are white. She listens for several moments, holding her breath, her eyes turned toward the floor above her. She wishes she could be there for him, somehow be there for both of them, but Sherlock needs her more right now. If he can carry out the last details of his plan successfully, then it won’t be long now at all; John won’t have long to wait.

The sound of the body falling to the floor above her makes Molly shut her eyes; but worse than that is the silence that follows. The silence of John’s grief fills the flat like a vacuum. She can feel the force of it like the shimmer of heat from a fire a long way off. She can’t bear it.

Wiping the tears off her cheeks, she hurries from the flat.

***

He makes it all the way to his room before he falls. 

It isn’t so much falling as it’s the ground rushing up to meet him. He welcomes it this time, doesn’t fight it like so many times in the past, and he is reminded sharply of the way his legs gave out beneath him the day that Sherlock fell.

The feeling is a little bit like that. His body doesn’t feel like it belongs to him anymore. It does things without consulting him, doesn’t seem to be connected in any way to his thoughts, his feelings, his brain. Because the feeling he’s experiencing (is that what this is called? This pain that’s eclipsed everything else?) is too much for his body to take. So it has to disconnect, to pull away from himself, to keep him sane.

 _Maybe I’ve just been drugged by Sherlock one too many times, maybe none of this is real._ The thought hurts, stings like salt in a raw wound, and John recoils from it.

No, this is very different from the day Sherlock fell. That day, he hadn’t been sure what he’d seen, didn’t know if he could trust his eyes. Later, he’d convinced himself that it could have been a trick, Sherlock could have worked his way around it somehow, outsmarted John as he had done time and time again.

Now there’s no more wishful thinking, no more tricks to get him out of it. All of his doubts, his speculations, his theories evaporate like smoke before his eyes. There is no shock to cushion his blow, no disbelief; he’s just falling.

There’s no poetry in falling, no magic. It’s basic physics. You can’t outthink it: the acceleration of gravity, object striking ground, body meeting its inevitable end. 

Now John knows for certain—even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t cheat death.

***

“Did you cry when you told him?”

Molly nods.

“Good. That will have made it more convincing. What did he do when you left?”

“He—” Sherlock is staring at her with a kind of nonchalant intensity. He isn’t fooling anyone.

“He what?”

“He didn’t say anything. He just nodded and walked out of the room.”

“Ah.”

“I heard him go up to his room, he fell. He—”

Sherlock’s eying her now with his terrifying scrutiny. “What?”

 _You broke him. You’ve broken him._

Sherlock grabs her by the shoulders. “What is it? Tell me, Molly!”

“Nothing. He believed me. He believed me and that’s what matters.”

Sherlock lets go of her arms.

Molly bites her lip. The unasked question in her mouth tastes as bitter as betrayal. 

_But are you going to be able to put him back together again?_

***

When John pulls himself off the floor, it’s been hours since Molly Hooper left. Outside the world is dark. He has to cover his eyes after switching on the light; the sudden brightness blinds him.

John goes to his desk drawer, pulls out his revolver.

Now that he knows Sherlock is gone, he has nothing left to keep him here. He has one thought: go to Mycroft and get a list of all of Moriarty’s living associates. He’ll kill them one by one, until someone stops him, or he ends up dead. The thought is steadying. In a world of meaningless emptiness, John knows at least that he can shoot straight, and well.

He walks downstairs in the dark, finds his jacket where he left it on the sofa, shrugs into it. The light from the streetlamps outside is reflecting off the edge of Sherlock’s violin. It’s beautiful. The polished wood looks like the source of light itself, seems to glow, the color of the finish like warm honey.

John takes it calmly in his hand and smashes it against the edge of the desk until he’s holding a tangle of strings and splintered wood. 

He feels no different; the numbness is still there blotting everything out. His mind is focused on one and only one incentive: revenge.

He lets himself out of the flat, doesn’t bother locking the door behind him. 

He knows he won’t be coming back.

***

He finds Mycroft at his desk. Getting in is easier than he anticipated. The secretary doesn’t try and stop him. She watches him walk past, with something like apprehension in her eyes. John isn’t sure if she recognizes him, or if she reads the unbalanced energy in the way he holds himself and decides it isn’t worth it. 

“Ah, good afternoon, John. To what do I owe—”

“I want their names. Moriarty’s operatives. And their files, as quick as you can get them for me.”

Mycroft’s smile is polite. “John, you must know that is classified information. I cannot simply hand it over to you. Please, have a seat. Would you like something to drink?”

“You know perfectly well that I know you can give me anything you bloody well want, whenever you bloody well please. I want their files.”

“You look tired, Dr. Watson. I hear you haven’t been quite yourself lately. Why not take a seat?”

John remains standing. His voice is low with fury. “How do you live with yourself?”

Mycroft’s polite smile turns puzzled. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“How do you wake up every morning knowing you’re the one who sold him out? That you handed your brother over to a criminal mastermind? You _let_ Moriarty walk free. You let him go when you _knew_ he would come after Sherlock! How could you?” He’s yelling now. 

Mycroft’s smile is becoming strained. “Why this sudden interest in the Moriarty case?”

John is shaking his head. “No. Don’t play that game with me, Mycroft. Don’t start.” 

“You misunderstood my question—I said why the _sudden_ interest? It’s been six months, John.”

“Does it matter? How could it possibly matter to you one way or another?” He’s yelling again. Mycroft’s only reaction is to raise one eyebrow a fraction of an inch. 

“If I were to give you this information—” 

“You owe this to him, Mycroft! You owe him some semblance of justice. This is the _least_ you can do!”

Mycroft waits, as if to ensure John won’t interrupt him again. “So I am to assume that you are going to take this information and ‘do him justice’ as you say, in your own charmingly lawless fashion? As touching as it may be, Dr. Watson, I don’t think you owe my brother that service.”

“Don’t talk to me about what I owe him! You sold him out! You never cared about him! Don’t tell _me_ what I owe him!”

“John, I don’t think Sherlock would have wanted—”

“DON’T YOU DARE SAY HIS NAME! You know what? Sod this.” 

John pulls the gun from his jacket and levels it at Mycroft’s chest. 

“John, be reasonable, what good could this possibly—” 

“Their names, Mycroft.”

He cocks the gun, watches Mycroft’s face pale.

“Do you know what I told Sherlock before he died? Do you want to know what I called him the last time we spoke face to face? A machine. That’s what I called him. A machine. But he wasn’t, Mycroft. I got it wrong. I got the wrong Holmes brother. You’re worse than I suspected. Do you know why? Because you feel no remorse. You’re the machine.”

Mycroft’s face is the color of ash. 

“Give me the files and I will walk out of this office and you will never have to see me again.”

Without a word, Mycroft reaches for the keys on his desk.

***

It takes him all night to find it.

He works his way through every address on the list but they’re all dead ends—the spiders long since left their nests. He starts out taking cabs from place to place but the last few are in neighborhoods only accessible on foot, dark warrens of filthy streets that seem untouched by time.

By the time he reaches the last one on his list, it’s nearly morning. His shoulder is aching, his shoes are soaked through, but he’s certain as soon as he sees it that this last one is right, and with that realization comes a feeling almost like relief. 

It’s an old warehouse by the side of the Thames, bulging out over the water like a cyst that needs draining, a bloated, sunken monster long since collapsed in on itself.

John circles the perimeter, keeping to the shadows as he searches for a way in.

He’s in the darkness by an old service elevator when they apprehend him. He doesn’t even hear them coming. When they knock him to the ground and kick the gun out of his hand, the sick feeling in John’s chest is one of embarrassment. _Out of practice._ And then something heavy strikes him in the head and the world goes dark.

***

Sherlock gets a text from Mycroft.

The message is one word. When he sees it he feels his heart stop.

_John._

***

When he comes to, the first thing he notices is the smell of rot—a putrid stench like old flesh decomposing—and the sound of water rushing very close by. _Warehouse by the river._ That, and he is cold. And his head aches. No, not aches. Worse than that. Like spikes driven in behind his eyes.

He opens his eyes, regrets it. A wave of nausea moves through him. _Mildly concussed. Take it easy, John._ He tries again, this time keeps his eyes opened, teeth clenched through the pain.

His vision is hazy but he can see the corners of a concrete room—old factory. He’s seated in a chair, hands cuffed behind him. Across from him an enormous window offers a view of grey water; several of the panes are missing, hence the sound and stench of river rushing in.

“Good, you’re awake. I was hoping we could have a chance to talk before the inevitable.”

The voice is unfamiliar—someone well educated, posh accent, perfect diction. He’s standing behind John just out of sight. He considers turning to look, instantly thinks better of it.

“I regret putting you in this position. Us military men have to stick together. I would have complete respect for you, if not for the company you keep. Or should I say kept?”

The man walks in a wide circle behind John—the sound of his shoes on the concrete floor echoing strangely in the cavernous space.

“I have to thank you, Dr. Watson, for making things so easy for us. We were on our way to come get you when you showed up on our doorstep.”

He’s walking back the way he came, still just out of John’s sight, the precision of his footsteps deliberate; each magnified click of his shoes against the floor is like a blow to the back of John’s head. 

“As I imagine you are unaware of the details surrounding James Moriarty’s final encounter with Sherlock Holmes, let me enlighten you. A certain bargain was struck on the rooftop of St. Bart’s that day. The terms of the bargain were very clear. Either Sherlock Holmes jumps from the building, or each of his three friends would find a bullet in their heads. The three targets being of course: Detective Inspector Lestrade, the housekeeper, and yourself. Our gunmen saw Holmes fall so the three victims were spared. However, it has recently come to our attention that Sherlock Holmes may still be alive; in which case, our three targets find themselves victims once again.”

 _Three gunmen?_ John’s heart is pounding. If he’s telling the truth… here, _here_ was the explanation for Sherlock’s fall, for Sherlock pretending that Moriarty was right. They had to see him jump. Otherwise, three gunmen… Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson… himself. He remembers suddenly the desperation in Sherlock’s voice. _“Stay exactly where you are!”_

“This is where you come in, Dr. Watson. In order to confirm this nasty rumor, we thought what better way to find out than to endanger the steadfast companion, the intrepid Dr. Watson? Surely, if Holmes is alive he’ll come to the aid of his friend.”

He’s come closer and closer to John as he talks, tightening the circle of his footsteps like a noose, until he stops directly behind John.

“It’s been several hours and we’ve had no sign from Holmes. It seems we may have been mistaken; Sherlock Holmes may actually be dead. In theory this would mean you’re off the hook. Your life is only forfeit if Holmes is still alive.” 

Although he can’t see this man, the danger coming off him is as palpable as the cold air pouring in through the broken window. John clenches his fingers into fists behind him, the adrenaline in his blood making his pulse throb in his temples.

“As I said, on principle I have nothing against you, Doctor. So if Sherlock Holmes _is_ dead what reason do I have to detain you here? Well, no reason, aside from the fact that you now know far more than is good for you, and the fact that you showed up on our doorstep with _this_ in your jacket, making your own intentions quite clear.”

He steps into John’s line of vision. The man is immaculately dressed in a dark suit. His grey hair is cropped close to his head, his jaw lean and crisscrossed with scars. His posture is relaxed but it’s a pretense. Everything about him screams military—high-ranking. He’s holding John’s pistol in his hands.

“What was your plan, Dr. Watson? Just stroll in and shoot us point-blank? Rather inelegant, wouldn’t you say? It seems you’re suffering in more ways than one from the loss of your friend.”

He looks up from the gun and into John’s eyes. The lines in his face are deep, the set of his mouth cruel. John knew men in the military like this, men who joined for all the worst reasons; before he met James Moriarty they were the most dangerous people John had ever encountered.

“Now that we have you here, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind confirming for us one way or another, whether Sherlock Holmes is truly dead. So tell me, Dr. Watson, is he still alive?”

John shakes his head, a burning hatred for this man growing rapidly within him.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to hear you say it. Let’s try again. Is Sherlock Holmes still alive?”

John swallows; his tongue feels swollen in his mouth. “No.”

“So just to be absolutely certain, in your own words, you mean to say that he is…?”

John says nothing.

“Please Dr. Watson, a little cooperation.”

John says nothing.

“Do you know I was also in Afghanistan, Dr. Watson?” He looks back down at the gun in his hands. “Colonel Sebastian Moran, maybe you heard of me. Dishonorably discharged in the spring of 2001, for ‘performing atrocities unfitting to a man of military service.’ Funny isn’t it that they kick you out of the army for murder. I never quite understood that. In any case, I prefer not to get my hands dirty these days. The whole dishonorable discharge business—left a bad taste in my mouth. Now I have people do that for me.”

A man steps out of the shadows. He’s tall, thickly muscled. He wears a dark cloth over his mouth.

“Fraser, could you please help Dr. Watson be a little more accommodating?”

The man is halfway across the room when John speaks. “He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to state his full name.”

“Sherlock Holmes is dead.”

“Thank you, Dr. Watson, that’s just what I needed to hear. Unfortunately, I don’t believe you. I find most people are reluctant to tell the truth unless pain is involved. In order to be quite certain I think a little pain wouldn’t go amiss. Fraser?”

Before John has a chance to react, the man takes hold of his shoulder and dislocates it neatly in one move.

The pain is unbelievable. John’s scream is like a live thing clawing its way out of his chest.

The tall man steps back.

“Now, let’s try this again. Where is Sherlock Holmes?”

John’s teeth are clenched tight against the pain. Let them kill him first. He won’t say it again.

“Come, Dr. Watson, it’s a simple question. Where is Sherlock Holmes?”

John says nothing. At a nod from Moran, Fraser steps forward and backhands John hard across the face. The motion jars his shoulder and it takes everything he has to hold in his scream.

“Goodness me, you are stubborn. I’m forgetting though, you were a Captain in Afghanistan, weren’t you? I suppose you’ve had your share of pain. A little harder please this time, Fraser.”

The large man hits John so hard in the head the blow knocks him from the chair. The sound he makes when he falls on his shoulder is inhuman.

Moran takes several steps until all John can see are his expensive polished shoes. He crouches down, makes a sign to Fraser who positions himself behind John, grabbing the elbow of his dislocated arm.

The gash on John’s forehead has opened up, and blood is running into his eye. _Just kill me. Just kill me now,_ he thinks. But he won’t give Moran the satisfaction. Let him draw it out. Frustrating Moran will be John’s last pleasure in life.

“I can see you’re not going to be of much use to us.” Taking John’s chin in his hand, Moran tilts his face back to look into his eyes. “It must be difficult for you—the fact that Holmes can’t even be bothered to come to your rescue. It seems you don’t mean much to him after all. Such a pity. I heard the two of you were quite the dynamic duo before Jim got involved.”

At the mention of Moriarty, rage blackens the corner of John’s vision. He tastes blood in his mouth. He spits it into Moran’s face.

Moran backhands him across the cheek. “Your defiance is touching. Sadly, I don’t have time for this.” He straightens up. “No matter. You’ve made my decision that much easier.”

Moran crosses to the window.

“I was just going to shoot you, but you’ve proved so aggravating I think you deserve a more unpleasant death. Tell me, Dr. Watson, are you a strong swimmer?”

He looks down at John.

“Get him on his feet.”

The grip on John’s arms shifts. He loses consciousness briefly as he is dragged upward, the pain in his shoulder is so intense. He comes to as the man behind him positions him in front of the plate-glass window. There is a hole in the glass three feet wide, six feet across, the dark sound of the river rushing below.

“Obviously this fall won’t kill you—the drowning will finish you off—but it’s fitting, isn’t it, that you’ll have a fall just like Holmes?”

The man behind John shoves him until his feet scrape the broken edge of the window—below him now nothing but dark water. 

“You must admit there’s a nice symmetry in that, a certain… poetic justice.”

Pain is making the world around him bleed like a runny watercolor painting. The wind outside is cold on his face; it yanks the collar of his jacket, tugging, as though impatient. John shuts his eyes. 

“Wrong.” Through the haze of pain John hears Sherlock’s voice as clearly as though he were standing in the room behind him. “Poetic justice would be me breaking every bone in your body and then pulling your organs out through your mouth, one by one, saving your heart for last so that you die, slowly, drowning in your own blood. Honestly, does no one read Dante anymore?”

John almost laughs. It’s so like something Sherlock would say.

And then he hears the sound of a gunshot, followed in close succession by two more. The grip on his arms falters, he is pushed forward, and then he is falling, falling from the window to the dark water below.

***

The water is cold; the shock of its impact is enough to jolt his body back to consciousness.

His hands are still bound behind him. He kicks briefly in an effort to propel himself to the surface but the motion jars his shoulder and the pain that flashes through him is more than he can bear. He goes still and feels his body start to sink. 

Underwater, he opens his eyes, sees lights overhead—grey light from the surface cutting strange patterns down through the gloom. The bubbles streaming from his mouth lift upward toward the surface so effortlessly—they are beautiful, each one filled with light. 

It’s so easy for the bubbles to rise; so easy for him to keep sinking down and down, his body as heavy as a stone.

The weeds at the bottom grasp his ankles, seem to pull at him. The lights of the surface look distant, dim and grey. The water around him is muddied with red, with the blood leaking from the gash on his face.

It won’t be long now, but it will be bad up until the end. Drowning won’t come easily to him; he’ll fight it, which will mean more pain.

John thinks of Sherlock kissing him. The rhythm of the weeds at his feet reminds him of Sherlock twined around him in the bath like some underwater creature. He thinks longingly of Sherlock’s fingers on his wrist from the dream, hands on his waist so light, it’s almost a caress. Maybe he and Sherlock can be lovers in the afterlife—in some deep circle of hell they’ll lie together, wrapped in flame.

He watches more bubbles escape his lips, carrying his precious oxygen to the surface, remembers suddenly what Sherlock said about the River Lethe, the souls of the dead drinking it to induce forgetfulness. How lovely it would be to erase the memory of all this pain, to just slip quietly away like falling asleep. 

The urge to take a breath has become unbearable. Perhaps the Thames could have the same effect. _Forget this; forget all of this._ Once more, he sees Sherlock falling from the roof of St. Bart’s, his coat fluttering around him like broken wings.

John throws his head back and opens his mouth, pulling water deep into his lungs. 

_I’m coming, Sherlock._

The darkness comes swiftly now but before it closes in John sees a figure swimming down to him—bright blue eyes, white face, dark hair wavering around his head like a crown. Some ghost sent down to guide him to the underworld. 

Then John recognizes Sherlock and he laughs.

The last thing he remembers: Sherlock’s arms closing around him, surprisingly solid for a ghost, kicking them both to the surface, pulling John back up toward the light.

***

He knows only two things: get John out of the water; get John breathing again. 

His world has narrowed to the space of John’s heart and his only concern is to ensure that it is beating. Nothing can stop him in the state he is in—the difficulties, the obstacles in his path—everything else falls away.

Later, he will regret not having the chance to kill Moran slowly, to grind each of his bones to dust, turn his organs to pulp in his chest, force him to cling miserably to the shreds of his life until his body is nothing but a source of endless agony. But there was no time for that. As soon as he saw John at the window—something in Sherlock flutters at the memory— _No, don’t think about it_ —his decision was made. Shoot Moran. Shoot the accomplice. Get John.

Of course, he’s no shot like John. It took him two bullets to bring Moran down. He missed the accomplice completely. By the time he’d fired the third bullet, he saw John fall from the window, John disappearing from sight, dragging Sherlock’s heart with him down into the dark water.

He got the accomplice in the back of the leg as he was fleeing—used several valuable seconds to shoot him in two other places that would prove fatal but result in a slow painful death, searched his pockets for the keys to the handcuffs on John’s wrists—and then, he was leaping from the window, diving into the water after John.

Now, he is struggling to the shore, John in his arms—his face bleeding against Sherlock’s shoulder, something not right about the angle of his left arm.

Sherlock’s mind is a blur of frantic calculations, racing on ahead of his infuriatingly slow body as he picks his way over the slippery stones on the shoreline. He is lucky—very lucky that the river is at low tide, but the stones are slick with mud, and Sherlock almost falls twice as he makes his way up the bank so he must walk carefully, painfully slowly, knowing that every second is another one in which John has not drawn breath.

He had been in the water for probably three minutes by the time Sherlock reached him; it had taken him another minute after that to get them both to the surface. It took all of Sherlock’s effort to carry him up through the water; John’s body seemed to resist the upward motion, as if there was some other force at work pulling him down, giving him extra weight, dragging him down into the weeds. 

_Don’t give up on me, John. You can’t give up on me now._

As he lowers John down onto the muddy ground, his mind is startlingly clear, firing commands that are easy to follow. No room for panic. Not yet.

He looks at John, eyes sweeping over his body, fingers following his eyes to assess the damage. Data, he’s just collecting data. 

Cold skin, slightly bluish—chance of cyanosis. Two abrasions on face, one still bleeding. Contusion on back of skull under hairline. Dislocated shoulder. Weak pulse. Not breathing. Not breathing. Not breathing.

Something in him skips, and for a valuable second he’s stuck there, immobilized. No time for panic. There is no time. He refocuses.

First, unlock handcuffs; second, realign shoulder. It’s a simply matter of bending the elbow and rotating the arm and shoulder inward towards the chest and then outward, pushing until the shoulder fits back into the shoulder joint.

He gets it on the first try. The pain of the realignment can be intense but John does not stir. 

Not good.

Third, begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He places his hands on John’s breastbone, positions himself over his hands, compresses his chest in quick succession, thirty times; checks for breath.

Still not breathing.

He tilts John’s head back, puts his mouth over John’s, pinches his nose closed and breathes into his lungs. 

Nothing.

He repeats the process; panic flickering under the ragged surface of his calm.

Still nothing. 

His panic is swelling now, making it difficult to breathe. He thrusts it down; repeats the process again, his mouth over John’s mouth, watching John’s chest lift with his breath.

“Come on.”

He thought the terror of watching John fall was enough to make his own heart stop, but this—this pathetic impotence to get John breathing again. He can’t, he won’t tolerate it.

“Come on, John! You can’t do this to me. I need you. I need you!”

He presses down harder, still keeping a quick but steady rhythm. Pauses. Breathes into John’s mouth, pushes air into his lungs. Waits. Starts over again.

“Come on, John. Come _on._ ”

His compressions on John’s chest are increasingly rough. His lips as they close over John’s this time are shaking. He sits back on his heels and waits, breathless.

Nothing.

Terror wipes his mind blank. He can’t think. His body has gone cold. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. He doesn’t know what to do. What can he do?

And then the thought that flashes through his mind with horrible brightness— _Is this what John felt that day standing outside of St. Bart’s?_

_Oh god, what have I done?_

He takes John by the shoulders, starts shaking him as hard as he can.

“Please, John. _Please._ ”

His cheeks are wet—he can’t breathe, can hardly see through his terror.

Not this, not this, anything but this.

And then, he hears it—the sound of John taking a breath, coughing, heaving water out of his lungs. Coughing, but breathing—the sweet drag of breath as he inhales, and Sherlock’s hands on his arms are probably hurting him, will probably leave bruises there the next day, but he can’t let go, his eyes are on John’s face, waiting for the sight of the reassuring dark blue gaze, storm grey, dark, dark, and sucking Sherlock down.

John opens his eyes.

***

Blue—all he sees in front of him, bright liquid blue. The color of the sky in winter, the color of the sea, ice cold and terribly bright. Something about the color catches in his chest; seems to fill him up, and it’s like being bathed in light. 

He wants to shut it out, it’s too intense; and then he sees the rest of Sherlock’s face, hovering above him.

Sherlock’s fingers tighten on his upper arms; it’s painful but John hardly registers the feeling, all he can think is: Sherlock’s face, Sherlock’s open eyes, alive, alive and looking into his.

But no, this can’t be happening. Sherlock’s dead.

John’s been fooled too many times, he won’t be fooled again. Now horror is crowding out every other feeling, the knowledge that he can’t survive this—this trick his mind is playing on him.

Sherlock sits back on his heels. He’s soaking wet, dark hair plastered to his forehead, his white face streaked with mud. He watches John with eyes like lights. He looks pale, unreal, as if he would pass through John’s fingers if he tried to touch him. And yet the grip of his hands on John’s shoulders felt so real…

John puts his hands over his eyes, starts shaking his head. “No. No. No. No. No.”

He can’t bear it. He can’t go through this again.

Sherlock leans forward. “John?”

He’s dripping on John as he hovers over him. Even with his eyes closed he can feel it; each drop of water on his face is like a taunt. The water feels real but Sherlock isn’t. He can’t be.

He looks up at Sherlock; at his face twisted up with fear. There’s a smear of blood on his cheek. _My blood._ Can ghosts feel pain?

“John, can you hear me?”

John struggles to sit up. He has to get away from this nightmare of a dream, this warped reality that’s worse than death, but Sherlock reaches out for him.

“John!”

“No. Not again.” He’s shaking his head. “I can’t do it.”

“John—”

“No!” He sits up, breathing hard, and Sherlock takes hold of his shoulders. John pushes him off. “No, you’re dead.”

“John, listen—”

“No. No, I can’t do this again.” He staggers to his feet, gasping.

Sherlock climbs to his feet too, follows him. John sees that there are tear tracks on his muddy face. “John, listen to me—”

“No! You’re dead!” he screams. “You’re dead! I buried you!”

The fury in him is blinding; he cannot tell if it is rage or grief that makes his shoulders start to shake. He can’t take it anymore.

“John—” Sherlock reaches out for him.

“NO!” John hits him in the mouth. He feels Sherlock’s teeth on his knuckles. The sensation fills him with terror—the teeth feel so real.

The punch is weak, but it’s still enough to split Sherlock’s lip and it jars his sore shoulder. John yells in pain, grasping his arm.

Panic is squeezing the air out of his lungs. He can’t breathe. “No, no, no, no—” 

He starts to fall but Sherlock is there; he catches him. His hands are on John’s shoulders as he sinks to his knees.

John swings at him again. “Let go of me! You’re not real! You’re not! I saw you fall! I saw—” He gasps again; he can’t catch his breath. “The blood… your eyes… I saw you lying there! Oh, Christ.” He puts a hand over his face. “Oh, god. I can’t do this.”

Sherlock lets go of him, sits back on his heels.

John rocks forward on his knees, shaking so hard his teeth are chattering. “How could you, Sherlock?” He doesn’t know if he means the fall, the real death or the fake, the nightmares or the dreams, drugged or conjured up by his own brain. All of it. Even part of it is more than John could take. “How could you do this to me?”

Sherlock doesn’t move. His mouth is bleeding. On his knees in the mud, his face streaked with dirt; he just looks at John. He doesn’t say anything. 

“How can I trust that you’re real now? After all this? How, Sherlock? Tell me _how._ ”

Sherlock crawls forward on his hands and knees. He stops in front of John, his knee touching John’s knee. The remorse in his eyes is something John has never witnessed. This time John doesn’t flinch away.

“I’ve lied to you and I’ve tricked you and I’ve lied to you again, but this time it’s real. This is real now. It’s over. Moran’s dead. They’re all dead. It’s finally over. I couldn’t… I couldn’t come back to you. I couldn’t tell you until they were all dead. You weren’t safe. I couldn’t—John, I couldn’t put you at risk but I did. I did it anyway. I’ll never forgive myself. So if you can’t forgive me I’ll understand but at least know that it was because I didn’t want—I couldn’t let… it was for you, John. It was all for you. All of it.”

There are tears running down Sherlock’s cheeks, making fresh tracks through the grime.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry… for everything.”

John lets out a sob and then he is falling forward onto Sherlock’s chest, seizing hold of his shoulders. “You bastard! You _fucking_ bastard!” He sobs into Sherlock’s neck, hands fisting in the back of Sherlock’s soaking shirt. 

It’s just like in the dream—which wasn’t a dream—John can’t control his sorrow and his rage. He’s sobbing so hard he can’t see. All the terror, all the grief of the last few months is throbbing through him and he howls into Sherlock’s chest like a wild thing. 

Sherlock holds him; one hand on the back of John’s head, fiercely protective.

“It’s alright, I’m here. I’m really here.”

He presses a kiss to John’s bloody forehead and then he’s grasping John’s face in his hands, tilting his gaze up to his own.

“John, listen to me. I remember what you said, that night in the water when I asked you why you kissed me.”

John’s body freezes. Sherlock can feel it under his hands—the stillness of his terror.

“You said it was something you’d been wanting to do and you couldn’t miss the opportunity. John, that was real. You said that to me.”

He watches John withdraw before his eyes—putting walls up. He’s in shock. Sherlock shouldn’t say it now, he should wait, but he can’t. He can’t wait another moment.

“It wasn’t just a dream. And I kissed you back, John. I kissed you back because as soon as you said it, I realized you were right. I won’t waste anymore time. I won’t do it. Not with you. Not after… everything. So I offer you this as proof.”

Sherlock leans forward and kisses him. 

His mouth is slippery on John’s—the tang of iron, the taste of Sherlock’s blood—but it’s warm and _real_ , Sherlock holding his face like it might break, his mouth not moving on John’s, full of hesitation but so full of tenderness. He can feel Sherlock’s eyelashes trembling against his cheek, and lifting himself up into Sherlock’s embrace, arms closing around his neck, John sobs into the kiss, his mouth opening to pull Sherlock deeper against him.

He can feel Sherlock’s heartbeat through his shirt against his ribs, the scratch of Sherlock’s unshaven cheek against his own, the drag of his lip as John adjusts his mouth. John breaks away, gasping.

He presses his forehead to Sherlock’s, looks into the blue of his eyes, overcome. Sherlock looks back at him. “Forgive me, John.” He shuts his eyes. He lets out an unsteady breath, and it’s warm on John’s cheek. “Forgive me.”

In answer, he tightens his arms around Sherlock’s neck.

Sherlock sighs into him and then pulls back. He can feel John trembling—his skin is cold where it touches Sherlock, and he is suddenly aware of the cold seeping in through the torn knees of his trousers, the blood still running from the gash on John’s face.

“Come on.” He eases an arm under John’s shoulders; helps pull him to his feet. John leans into him heavily—gives him all his weight— _trusting him_ —and at that realization Sherlock’s chest is suddenly full of light. He turns toward the bank, toward the cold grey of the London morning. “Let’s go home.”

***

When they push open the front door of 221B, the door banging into the wall with a satisfying crash, John is barely able to stay on his feet. It’s only Sherlock’s arm under his shoulders that keeps him upright.

“Mrs. Hudson!” Sherlock bellows as they head down the hall, dripping rank river water in their wake. “Some hot brandy for Dr. Watson, please! And a cold one for me, I think.”

Mrs. Hudson appears in the doorway of her flat and screams. 

Sherlock stoops to kiss her cheek. “No, not dead. Sorry for all the grief. I’ll explain it later. No time to chat now. Got to get the doctor upstairs.”

She smacks Sherlock on the arm, makes a noise like a shrew being run through with a rake, and then pulls them both into a hug.

Sherlock pats her on the back with his free hand. She pulls back, swats at Sherlock again, her face scrunched up with tears, and then runs back into her flat.

Sherlock supports John up the stairs and helps lower him down onto the couch. Sherlock sits beside him. He doesn’t ask and John is relieved that Sherlock seems to know what he wants, seems to intuit that even sitting across from Sherlock right now would be too much distance, too strange in their new-old flat, each of them sitting in their respective chairs. 

So instead they sit side-by-side, equally exhausted and overwhelmed, not speaking, trying to get used to the feeling of relief that feels like it isn’t theirs to take. John doesn’t trust it—can’t trust any of it. 

Mrs. Hudson comes upstairs with the brandy, weeping. She kisses Sherlock again and again on the cheek. Wrings her hands, heads to the door, comes back and kisses him again.

She fusses over Sherlock—over John—hands them each a brandy, starts up a fire in the grate and it’s nice to have someone filling up the flat with happy noise that John doesn’t have to pay attention to. John basks in it, sips his brandy, feels the heat of the fire begin to restore warmth in his limbs. He should really go and take a shower—wash the stench of blood and river off his skin, the memory of Moran’s fingers on his cheek—but he can’t be bothered and he won’t leave Sherlock’s side. Not yet.

“I texted Lestrade, warned him about the mess.” Sherlock is holding his glass up to the light, studying the amber liquid.

“You—but what about—everything in the papers, how…?”

“Oh, it’s all settled. Mycroft’s been sitting on the proof. It was just a matter of getting the last of Moriarty’s circle taken care of so they didn’t go after the three of you.” He says it so nonchalantly, but his hand shakes as he raises his glass to his lips.

“Mycroft?” John feels like he’s been hit in the gut. Mycroft knew? All along? He puts his face in his hands. “Oh god. Sherlock, I threatened your brother at gunpoint.”

Sherlock chokes and John looks up; startled, to realize he’s laughing. “Ahh, I wish I could have been there! Oh John, to see the look on his face! I’m sure you terrified him.”

John’s brain hurts. There are too many unanswered questions but he doesn’t have the energy to ask them, much less listen to the answers. There’s already too much to occupy his brain—his senses struggling to take in the reality of Sherlock. Wet hair, sharp cheekbones, warm arm against his, here, _here_ , beside him, alive. Alive.

He refuses to let Sherlock take him to the hospital. Sherlock brings it up after Mrs. Hudson’s gone back downstairs, breaches the subject in a roundabout, casual way but John shakes his head.

“I’m a doctor, Sherlock. I’ll be fine. I know how to look after a strained shoulder and a few cuts and bruises.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything, but John sees him purse his lips, hears the unspoken protest even though he hasn’t opened his mouth. _Yes, and what about nearly drowning? Possible damage to internal organs, permanent bruising of the—_

He interrupts Sherlock’s silent stream of diagnostics. “I’ll take care of myself. Don’t worry.”

To put Sherlock at ease, he goes into the bathroom, cleans off the gash on his face and bandages it.

When he comes back into the living room he finds Sherlock eyeing the space critically. 

“You broke my violin.” He sounds surprised. Not upset, just surprised.

“Yes.”

“Well, it wasn’t a very nice one anyway. I got it from a grade-school student second hand.”

“You—? Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

“No, it’s a boring story.”

Sherlock’s eyes are flickering around the flat. He takes in the flowers on the desk and pulls a face. “Oh, _god_ , Mrs. Hudson’s gone domestic on us. I’ll have to say something to her.”

“Don’t you dare.” Something is happening to John’s face as he says it, as he takes in Sherlock’s utter revulsion at the tiny vase of purple flowers. It’s a strange sensation and he realizes he’s smiling. Grinning so widely his face actually hurts. 

“Don’t you dare.”

***

Lestrade comes by a little later. He walks into the flat grinning, pounds Sherlock on the back, messes up his hair; can’t stop congratulating him. “I knew it! I knew all along that none of it was true. I knew you couldn’t be a fake! I just never imagined you’d manage to come back from the dead. Brilliant! Brilliant stuff.”

He stays and has a drink.

Molly Hooper stops by and before she’s even taken off her coat she’s thrown her arms around John’s neck, sobbing, begging his forgiveness. 

“I never would have gone along with it! It was all Sherlock’s idea, you’ve got to forgive me.”

John puts his hands on her shoulders. “It’s alright. I understand. You don’t need my forgiveness.”

Lestrade presses a drink into her hand and she takes it, wiping tears off her cheeks, but she can’t stop crying the whole time she’s there. Every time she looks from John to Sherlock, she’s taken by another fit of weeping. 

“I’m just so pleased it’s all worked out!” she says through her tears. “So, so pleased.”

Lestrade offers to take her home and before she goes, Sherlock pulls her into a hug, kisses her cheek. “Thank you for everything, Molly Hooper. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

She nods, kisses him back, can’t speak through her tears.

John hugs her too before she goes. He’s looking forward to finding out what part Molly had to play in all this. Clearly he has underestimated her.

After they’ve all gone, John goes to take a shower and when he comes back, feeling slightly more human, he finds Sherlock sitting in his chair, the mangled violin on his knees.

He stands awkwardly for a moment in the doorway. “I’ll get you a new one.”

Sherlock looks up at him—his eyes fathomless. “I think I know why you broke it.” 

The murky afternoon light coming in through the window strikes him from behind, makes him look almost transparent. John experiences a moment of irrational fear. He wants to go over and put his hand on Sherlock’s arm, make sure he is still solid. Instead, he falls into his own chair opposite Sherlock.

“Why?”

“Because you were angry. Because… it reminded you of me. You couldn’t bear to see it still here when I was gone.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“You were right. Yesterday on the bridge. I followed you. I had to make sure you didn’t go back to Baker Street. They were watching you, waiting for me to show myself. They were watching you because of me.”

Sherlock closes his hand around the neck of the broken violin, squeezes.

“The reason I came back… it was purely selfish. Every time I came, I told myself it would be the last but… I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t… I couldn’t function without you. I went mad, John. I went mad without you.”

Sherlock’s eyes are dark in the firelight. John lifts his chin in acknowledgment of what Sherlock has said but he can’t speak. He looks into the fire, eyes burning.

They sit for a long time without speaking, the fire burning low in the grate. 

John is exhausted. However the thought of sleep terrifies him. His eyes have started to drift closed of their own accord but he doesn’t want to take the risk of falling asleep only to discover this was all a dream. The thought of lying alone in his dark bedroom, the curtains and the walls riddled with the memories of his nightmares—he cannot face it, not after everything that’s happened.

At one point he starts to drift off but, instantly, he jolts awake, his heart pounding. He hasn’t made a sound but Sherlock is looking at him from across the room.

He tells himself he’s being ridiculous. He can’t spend the rest of his life not leaving Sherlock’s side and he’ll have to sleep eventually. John stands up. “Well, it’s been a long day. I think I’d better...” He gestures to the door.

Sherlock nods.

John hesitates in the doorway for a half-second before going up the stairs, his back to Sherlock. He almost turns, but then thinks better of it. What would he say? _Please come with me, I’m terrified of my own bed?_ He flexes the fingers of his left hand, squares his shoulders and walks through the door.

The shadows in the stairwell look ominous to him as he makes his ascent, every step he takes away from Sherlock increasing his panic. He shakes off the feeling, swallows a handful of strong painkillers before climbing into bed. He knows tomorrow will be hell for his body. The shock and adrenaline have managed to keep the pain at bay but tomorrow will be a different story.

His bed is cold when he climbs into it—his shoulder is already aching. He turns over on his side, squeezes his eyes shut, and listens to the sound of his pulse throbbing against the mattress. He tries to breathe deeply to calm his beating heart when he hears the door to his room open.

John turns and sees Sherlock standing in the threshold, one hand on the doorknob, looking oddly indecisive. 

“May I come in?”

John nods. He can’t speak—his throat has closed up.

Sherlock shuts the door softly behind him, kicks off his shoes on the way to the bed and then climbs in beside John.

John scoots over to make room for Sherlock. His heart is beating so fast. He feels like he should say something.

“You don’t have to do this. I’m—” He swallows around the tightness in his throat. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure you will be.”

John feels Sherlock’s voice vibrate in the mattress beneath them. He wants so badly to reach out and grab onto some part of Sherlock but he doesn’t move. He stays where he is, lying on his side, turned away.

“I’m not going to leave you alone again.” Sherlock’s voice is fierce in the darkness. “I won’t do that to you. Not ever again.”

John puts his fist to his mouth to stifle his sob but his hand doesn’t get there in time, and then Sherlock is reaching out to him and John rolls over to face him and Sherlock is pulling him in against his chest.

His tears are hot on the bare skin of Sherlock’s neck and he’s probably ruining Sherlock’s shirt but he doesn’t care. He wraps his arms around Sherlock’s back, feels Sherlock’s leg twining between his in an effort to bring them closer together, and they fit so snugly against each other it’s like the curves of John’s body were made to compliment the lines of Sherlock’s.

Sherlock’s breath is warm against his ear and John exhales in shaky relief, his lips dragging on Sherlock’s collar bone as he turns his head to breathe in the scent of Sherlock—soap, resin, and smoke from the fire—the sharp scent of brandy still on his breath. 

He revels in every detail of Sherlock’s warm and living body against his—his ribs under John’s fingers—too pronounced (tomorrow his goal will be to get Sherlock eating again), the soft thump of his heartbeat under John’s ear, the tendons in his neck shifting as he tugs John closer. At the thought of that tomorrow—there _will be_ a tomorrow in which he and Sherlock will be together—John’s heart is singing and he feels as though he will break open from his happiness.

The tears are pouring down his cheeks now, soaking Sherlock’s shirt, and Sherlock bends down and kisses John’s cheek.

“Do you know how I hated myself when I stood and watched you having nightmares? Oh John, do you know how I wanted to go to you?”

John lets out a sob and now Sherlock is kissing his closed eyes, kissing the corner of his jaw, his ear, every inch of his face.

“Oh, John. John, John, John. My John, I’ll never leave you again.”

And then Sherlock is pulling John’s mouth up to his and kissing him, John’s tears running hot between them, seasoning the sweetness of his relief with the taste of sorrow.

It isn’t long before John’s exhaustion catches up with him. He starts to fall asleep, his head tucked under Sherlock’s chin, Sherlock’s arm around his shoulders.

As he drifts off he thinks how strange it is that they should be lying here like this, so tangled up in one another he cannot tell where Sherlock ends and he begins. What does this mean for them in the days ahead?

Whatever it means, they have time now to figure it out—they have all the time in the world—and John plans to use it and use it well.

 

_Fin_


End file.
